BRUSSELS, April 3. /TASS/. European Union Foreign Affairs Chief Josep Borrell has supported UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who called on G20 nations to lift sanctions on other countries to help combat the coronavirus pandemic, Borrell said on Friday after the video conference with the foreign ministers of 27 EU members.
"We have also discussed that sanctions should not impede the delivery of essential equipment and supplies necessary to fight the coronavirus," Borrell said. "We also have been working on a communication that would bring support both to the UN Secretary-General and the UN Special Envoy for Human Rights to soften global sanctions for humanitarian reasons."
Apart from that, Borrell supported the UN Secretary-General’s appeal to stop fighting immediately, saying that "in some countries which are under big trouble and heavy fighting, like Syria, Libya or Yemen, devastating effects of the coronavirus can be multiplied by two threats at the same time."
"That’s why we fully support the UN Secretary-General’s efforts to coordinate a worldwide response to the pandemic. We also support his appeal for an immediate global ceasefire," the EU foreign policy chief stressed.
On March 24, the UN Secretary-General urged all countries to ease the current sanctions on certain states for the sake of struggle against the pandemic and also to cease hostilities. Later, the UN General Assembly passed an alternative, more general draft resolution containing a call for solidarity in the fight against the pandemic, which ignored the UN Secretary-General’s proposal for cancelling sanctions. The Russian draft that proposed more specific measures was rejected, which would obstruct joint work against the coronavirus pandemic, as Russia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations said.
In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia.
On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. To date, more than 1,000,000 people have been infected worldwide and over 53,000 deaths have been reported. That said, over 213,000 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.